People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch: ‘The Saddest Thing You’ll See Today’

Karl and Judy Schowengerdt share the story of how their son's homosexual activity led to a diagnosis of HIV, and his early death as the result of AIDS. They live in Iowa and oppose the recent Iowa Supreme Court action forcing County Recorders to issue homosexual marriage licenses, because they know first hand the pain that homosexuality causes within a family.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

It's OK to feel terrible for this couple's loss, but really, it's equally sad to see them being used in a disinformation campaign about gay people and HIV. The parents end up dehumanizing their own son. Listen to how they talk. It's as if they're embarassed he ever lived. Yet he's supposedly the victim of predatory gays who lured him into some sort of "lifestyle" and then abandoned him when he got sick. The video's producers make incredible leaps over huge gaps in information, and then use these grieving parents to gloss over it. What a shame.

The underlying issue here is not with homosexuality. The parents were not accepting of their son and made him feel ashamed of himself. That is the true breakdown of the family, there is no such thing as unconditional love. The father and mother in this video could only love their son if he fit into what they wanted. He kept his lifestyle a secret and then renounced his homosexuality to gain their acceptance at the time of his death. He could not gain their love an approval unless he did.